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i actually wondered about this too .. I'm hoping by the time i have to think about it someone might have something aftermarket of it they make them drone size play with it on my drone until i commit to something larger

Well, there's lots of pie-in-the-sky in that article, but one thing that stood out:

... a charging time of 42 minutes for the 85 kWh battery of a top of the line Tesla Model S.

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.

That's something like a 1.5C charge rate. Certainly not the "20X faster than Li-ion" the title specifies.

Heck, superchargers today charge the Model S at ~1.5C for the initial portion of the curve, Of course, the taper ultimately requires that a full charge ends up taking something more than an hour, so if these batteries didn't require any taper that would be an improvement... just not a 20X improvement...

It'd be awesome if all these breakthroughs were true, but as Elon said, you should essentially believe about 1% of what you read when it comes to battery promises. In this case, the article predicted imminent mass production and it's now 2 years later with no news.

Also, keep in mind with charging that Tesla is currently limited at the infrastructure level, not the car. The top-line Supercharger is 120kW with 150kW planned. Beyond reasonable points, the infrastructure cost begins to get prohibitive. Tesla is already pulling a 12kV, 750kVA feed from the utility. Also, realize that 20x the charging speed while at the same voltage means 20x the current, which is unmanageable. They'd need to change the composition in such a way that increased the voltage substantially to achieve a 20x charging speed improvement.

tl;dr Don't expect miracles regarding charging speed. There are a number of physical/cost limits in play.

[This is back-of-the-napkin math, someone can correct the numbers if I've mangled them]

Also, keep in mind with charging that Tesla is currently limited at the infrastructure level, not the car.

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The utility is not even close to being the limiting factor. There are Supercharging stations with 10 stalls, meaning 5 x 135 kW total. It's the battery pack that has limitations. The cells can be charged faster but it would require more aggressive cooling and it would probably reduce battery life. Elon said the Supercharger rate is actually on the conservative side to see what the long term effects are.

The utility is not even close to being the limiting factor. There are Supercharging stations with 10 stalls, meaning 5 x 135 kW total. It's the battery pack that has limitations. The cells can be charged faster but it would require more aggressive cooling and it would probably reduce battery life. Elon said the Supercharger rate is actually on the conservative side to see what the long term effects are.

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That's not the batteries fault, that's the cooling systems fault. You can charge virtually any type of battery almost instantly, you just need to be able to deal with the heat.

The utility is not even close to being the limiting factor. There are Supercharging stations with 10 stalls, meaning 5 x 135 kW total. It's the battery pack that has limitations. The cells can be charged faster but it would require more aggressive cooling and it would probably reduce battery life. Elon said the Supercharger rate is actually on the conservative side to see what the long term effects are.

Click to expand...

By "infrastructure" I mean to include the charging station capability, which is currently limited by design to 135kW. The battery isn't the limiting factor.

Meta

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